The Disney movie Into The Woods won’t be in theaters until Christmas, but the teaser trailer which came out recently makes it look like it might be a fun film to watch. It takes four classic Brothers Grimm stories and ties them together with a new tale written just for the movie, bringing the whole thing up to contemporary times. A lot of humor and a few good tunes round out the presentation, which has one central theme: be careful what you wish for.
The film of interest this week is The Giver, about a boy growing up in utopia, who reaches a point in his life when he is chosen to be the one of his generation to learn about the real world. When he does, he realizes his community is fake, artificially insulated from reality, and it forces him to make some serious choices. Based on the book by Lois Lowry, this one explores the nature of discovering the world is not like the one your parents created to keep you safe as you grew up. I should also mention that the The Expendables 3 comes out this week as well; it may not be genre, but it is cult, and that counts for something.
In Movies this week we get Muppets Most Wanted, yet another excursion into the silliness that follows all things Muppet. Evil Kermit escapes from a gulag and tries to hide out by replacing the series primary protagonist, and as usual there are an assortment of well known stars along for the ride. In animation, Batman: Assault on Arkham is quite dark, taking place in the Arkham Asylum universe. This was shown at SDCC, but otherwise is a direct to video release. It did get 95% at Rotten Tomatoes and an excellent review in Forbes, so I am expecting it to be quite enjoyable. If you are in the mood for a genre documentary, Turtle Power: The Definitive History of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles gives their history and an inside look at their creator.
In TV the show Bitten: The Complete First Season is a different kind of Werewolf story with a female protagonist. It is based on writer Kelley Armstrong’s Women of the Otherworld books, and her heroines are all strong women. I do enjoy seeing an author I like have their works turned into TV programs or movies, and this one has been picked up for a second season, returning in 2015.
In Anime Fantasista Doll: Complete Collection is about a girl who has a deck of cards which can generate 5 magical girls who’s powers are needed to defend the Earth. Good thing she is a former champion of a trading card game competition, at least she has a clue about using cards in combat. From the New World: Collection 2 has Saki reeling from the death of her friends, but the conspiracies she has uncovered are only the tip of the iceberg. If she is to survive, she has to defeat the attacks on her mind and memories and uncover the secrets of two worlds.
Base Ball Bear had a new CD come out in June, and as always they have some rocking tunes on it. The first one is I did not like so much from the new release, the second is Senkou Hanabi, which came out in 2013 as a single. If you like these, they have many more for you to enjoy.
The newest version, Knoppix 7.4.0, is now available for download. This Linux build is specifically designed to be a Live Disc, meaning you can boot it directly off the CD, DVD, or USB device, and never need to install it to your computer. It comes with a ton of free software, up to 2Gig on the CD and 9Gig worth on the DVD, thanks to the on-the-fly decompression it does as you launch each program. Besides having more programs, the DVD version also supports both 64Bit and 32Bit platforms, and has multiple desktops to choose from, including both GNOME and KDE as well as the default LXDE file manager. It includes a full set of rescue programs, software utilities designed to help get your broken Windows or Linux computer working again, including anti-virus cleaners, partition managers, and much more. It comes with Wine 1.7 so you can run your windows software in it, and Virtualbox 4.3.14 on the DVD version if you want to run any other operating systems inside it. A lot of the Live Discs I have mentioned here are built on this platform, which is the longest running Live Disc Linux build I know of, and there are a host of specialized builds spun off from it. If you haven’t tried Linux yet, download the ISO file, burn it to disc, and then boot your computer from it. You will be amazed at how easy it is to use and how powerful it is.
InterScreech 2013 was assembled by Julie Meitz and focused on the surreal side of Linguistics. It was created as a presentation to Interspeech 2013, the world’s largest conference on the science and technology of Spoken Language Processing. Some of their disciplines include speech production, phonetics, speech synthesis, and speaker recognition. Julie has created a number of other interesting videos you should take the time to check out after watching this one.
InterScreech 2013 ! from Julie Meitz on Vimeo.